I barely have any words, and I don't know where to start with the few I have. I finished this ten minutes ago, and just finished sobbing my eyes out. Despite this, this isn't a flat-out sob story. It's a story where you cry for a minute or two here and there, and then you don't cry at all for another fifty pages. Then at the end you a cry a little bit more, for the tragedy of the whole thing. But you know what's coming and you've already felt the punch, and I think that was done really well by Markus Zusak, because it gives you the feeling that his mission with this book is to actually tell you a story, and not just a cheap plot to make you cry, because a lot of the time the sob-books do get really popular, and it's nice to know that he wasn't just counting on our emotional reaction to make this popular. He cared about the story and he cared about the characters, and he wanted us to care about them too, which succeeded, at least with me.

All the characters were wonderfully written and displayed in such a believable way. I don't know to say that "all the characters were grey" and "there was no truly bad or good characters", because this is Nazi Germany we're talking about, and there were some truly nasty people back then, of course, there is no denying, and some of them were in this book. Most of them, however, were characters you could root for and feel for, and I appreciated that. It showed a different side to life under WW2 than what we usually see (or at least what I've seen) in literature.

The book was at times very slow-paced, but it didn't stop me from needing to turn the page, because just because there wasn't a lot of action going on all the time, I always needed to find out what happened to Liesel, Rosa, Hans, Rudy, Max and the others next. Again, as I said, it was another side of life during WW2, and it showed that even then life could have good days and okay days.

Just to touch on the narrator, that was fantastic. I was very skeptical going into this knowing that Death would be telling the story (sorry if that is a spoiler, but it's pretty much revealed in the prologue so I don't think it matters), because I was afraid his world would take too much away from Liesel's story, and that it was confusing. Thankfully, it was not like that at all, and this was still one hundred percent Liesel's story, just with a rather different narrator.

Very well done. I would say I'm excited for the movie to come out next year (yes, next year, because us norwegians get our movies late), but I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to my heart being broken all over again. I have seen the trailer a couple of times, and the cast looks fantastic and it will probably be great.